New Amsterdam News

"Preventing drugs from entering city jails often creates a hostile atmosphere... A Freedom Agenda member who asked to be only identified as Marie recounted how a corrections officer prevented her from a contact visit with a loved one on Rikers Island after swabbing her hands."

Queens Daily Eagle

“Darren Mack, the co-director of the criminal justice advocacy group Freedom Agenda, blasted the mayor for his 11th-hour pitch on Tuesday. "New Yorkers have been consistently calling on the mayor to fund our city's mental health infrastructure to scale... now he has an idea to basically recreate the asylums that were shut down decades ago, and conveniently impede closing Rikers in the process?"

NY Daily News

“Mayor Adams has spent his entire administration sending hundreds more people to Rikers, especially people with serious mental illness, and it’s been a failure in terms of addressing public safety, and that’s because Rikers doesn’t address the problems anyone is facing. If anything, it worsens them.” - Darren Mack, Freedom Agenda co-director

The City

“The isolation and deprivation of Rikers is designed to feed a cycle of violence, not interrupt it,” Darren Mack, co-director of Freedom Agenda, told THE CITY.

The City

“The isolation and deprivation of Rikers is designed to feed a cycle of violence, not interrupt it,” Darren Mack, co-director of Freedom Agenda, told THE CITY. “If we want safer communities, we can’t achieve that by sending people to fight for their lives on an out-of-site, out-of-mind penal colony.”

NY Daily News

“Darren Mack, co-founder of...Freedom Agenda questioned Goldsmith’s claim that judges don’t decide where defendants are placed. “Judges know where they’re sending the people they remand or set bail on, and they know what’s likely to happen to the people they send to Rikers.”